Dear all,
I just saw this posting on comp.text.tex, and it seemed relevant to this
list.
Michael
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael Kohlhase, Office: Newell Simon Hall 4623
Adjunct Associate Professor 5000 Forbes Avenue,
School of Computer Science Pittsburgh, Pa 15213-3891, USA.
Carnegie Mellon University tel/fax: +1 412 268 5749/6298
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kohlhase e-mail: <kohlhase+@cs.cmu.edu>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------- Forwarded Message
Forwarded: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 09:34:25 -0500
Forwarded: "CCaps Developers <+dist+~sutner/dl/ccaps-dev.dl@andrew.cmu.edu> "
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!newsfeed.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.ece.cmu.edu!usenet01.sei.cmu.edu!news.cis.ohio-state.edu!news.ems.psu.edu!news.cse.psu.edu!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.uchicago.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!panix!forkosh
From: John Forkosh <john@invalid.com>
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: announcing mimetex
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:05:50 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC
Lines: 60
Message-ID: <ar2uvu$n33$1@reader1.panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com
X-Trace: reader1.panix.com 1037369150 23651 166.84.1.3 (15 Nov 2002 14:05:50 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:05:50 +0000 (UTC)
User-Agent: tinx 1.2.12
Xref: asuka.mt.cs.cmu.edu comp.text.tex:150816
History:
Around the middle of September I got some very helpful advice
in comp.text.tex about using TeX fonts in an external program,
and around the end of October uploaded gpl'ed mimeTeX to
ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/mimetex/mimetex.zip
Note: a nasty bug in its array command is fixed by replacing
mimetex.c and mimetex.h with the two files in
http://www.forkosh.com/mimefix.zip
Brief description:
MimeTeX parses LaTeX math expressions, emitting either mime
xbitmaps or gif images of them, which can be used in html
documents in the form, e.g.,
<img src="../cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?f(x)=\int_{-\infty}^xe^{-t^2}dt"
border=0 align=absmiddle>
allowing you to embed math directly in html, which reduces
the need for lots of external gif images and makes your html
documents more readable and easily maintained. An online
demo and tutorial is at
http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html
MimeTeX isn't primarily meant for latex2html-like tasks
where you're maintaining native (La)TeX documents that are
later redistributed in several formats, including html.
Rather, mimeTeX is primarily meant to help maintain
native html documents containing math. In this sense
it's a kind of "lightweight" alternative to MathML,
with the advantage that mimeTeX preserves (La)TeX syntax.
Similar non-MathML packages, including textogif
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/textogif/textogif.html
and gladTeX,
http://www.math.uio.no/~martingu/gladtex/
require setup procedures that use TeX to help generate external
gif (or png) images of your equations, which are later included
in your html document as it's being rendered. MimeTeX, as far
as I know, is the only such non-MathML package that has its
own built-in rendering engine, entirely independent of TeX,
and therefore requires no setup procedure or external images
whatsoever. It renders realtime, on-the-fly images directly
from your LaTeX math embedded in html documents.
Philosophy:
Widespread use of MathML will eventually dilute the
population of LaTeX-aware users, muddying LaTeX's future.
(La)TeX is more than "TeX The Program"; TeX is its syntax.
Knuth produced a test suite that validates any program
claiming to be TeX, so no one version of the code is
particularly important. It's the syntax that's important.
(La)TeX will survive so long as a significant user
population continues to use this syntax.
MathML poses a threat to LaTeX's syntax in the html/xml
market, so it's important to provide some LaTeX-compliant
alternative. MimeTeX is meant to be a prototype alternative.
It's probably too small and kludgey for a final solution,
but it demonstrates feasibility, and is full-featured
enough to measure potential interest in LaTeX-compliant
alternatives to MathML.
- --
John Forkosh ( mailto: j@f.com where j=john and f=forkosh )
------- End of Forwarded Message